


everything I have ever learned

by Fialleril



Category: Star Wars Original Trilogy
Genre: Canon Compliant for Lucas' Six Films, Canonical Character Death, Character Study, Coming of Age, Gen, Luke Skywalker: The Jedi Who Did Come Here To Free Slaves, Not Sequel Trilogy Compliant, Slavery, Tatooine Slave Culture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-20
Updated: 2019-06-04
Packaged: 2020-01-22 23:56:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18538078
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fialleril/pseuds/Fialleril
Summary: Skywalker,the deep hollow voice of the desert says, echoing like a heartbeat in his bones.Do you know what your name means?





	1. the fires and the black river of loss

**Author's Note:**

> Ages and ages ago @becauseforoncethisisme over on tumblr sent me this ask: "Let's talk about Luke and how he helps people. How he respects people. How he is good to people. Please."
> 
> This fic is my very delayed response to that ask. It's a two-part character study of Luke Skywalker, the Jedi who did come here to free slaves, through the lens of my Tatooine slave culture headcanons. It basically follows the original trilogy, and is fully canon compatible with the original six films, but it's _not_ compatible with the Expanded Universe (either Legends or Disney's new EU), and it's definitely not compatible with Disney's sequel trilogy.
> 
>  **Please, please, do not comment about the sequel trilogy on this fic.** Not even to compare the characterization. Please just don't do it.
> 
> Final note on inspiration: The title and chapter titles for this fic are drawn from Mary Oliver's poem _In Blackwater Woods_. The relevant stanzas are:
> 
> Every year  
> everything  
> I have ever learned
> 
> in my lifetime  
> leads back to this: the fires  
> and the black river of loss  
> whose other side
> 
> is salvation,  
> whose meaning  
> none of us will ever know.  
> To live in this world
> 
> you must be able  
> to do three things:  
> to love what is mortal;  
> to hold it
> 
> against your bones knowing  
> your own life depends on it;  
> and, when the time comes to let it go,  
> to let it go.

His first clear memory is of light glinting on the rusted husk of a vaporator and Aunt Beru’s voice, rough and warm, humming an old work song. _Tena light the fires_ , she sings. _The night is drawing in._

Luke is three years old. He watches the gleam of the twin suns and the way the light dances over Aunt Beru’s hands as she works. When he’s older, she’ll tell him that he came over to help her, that he took the vaporator from her hands and fixed it himself, almost by instinct. It was the first thing he ever fixed.

He doesn’t remember that, though. What he remembers is the light, the strength of her hands, and the song.

*

He’s five years old when he learns, really learns, what his name means. It’s his first day at the dilapidated school in Anchorhead, and he doesn’t know anyone there except Biggs. When the teacher calls their names, the rest of the class points and snickers at Darklighter and Skywalker. During the first break, several of the older boys shove Luke against a wall and call him “slave scum.”

One of them has to go home with a bite wound on his shoulder. They all stay well clear of him after that.

Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen ground him, even though they also say they’re proud of him for sticking up for himself. There’s no shame in being the descendant of slaves, Aunt Beru says. (“ _Freed_ slaves,” Luke insists, and it will be a few years yet before he understands why she looks so disappointed at that.) He comes from a long line of survivors, people blessed by Ar-Amu and by Ekkreth whose name they bear.

“Do you know what your name means, Luke?” she asks.

Luke sniffs, wiping the back of his hand across his nose, and mumbles, “It’s Ekkreth’s name.”

Aunt Beru laughs softly. “Yes,” she says. “But I meant your first name. Your parents named you Luke, and that means ‘free.’ You are the Free Skywalker. The first Skywalker ever born free. Don’t ever forget that.”

Luke perks up, wide and beaming, at the mention of his parents. “I won’t forget, Aunt Beru,” he says.

*

Uncle Owen has a slave-owner’s license. Sometimes he jokes it’s the only real difference between the Empire and the Republic that came before it. Used to be, Uncle Owen says, you could own slaves without a license. Now everything’s regulated.

There’s a fee for the license, of course. Every year, they have to renew it. Aunt Beru hates it. She says it’s compounding evil. But every year they pay the fee.

Aunt Beru calls it a bribe. She says the word with a quiet rage, hard as stone and ancient as the desert. “The Masters always want to control language,” she tells Luke. “But you are Free. So you call a thing by its name, no matter what the Masters say.”

The bribe, or the license, gives them just enough cover when the inspectors come. Owen Lars, like many farmers, keeps a few slaves to help with the farm work. He just never seems to keep them for long.

Aunt Beru runs the surgery out of a hidden space in the back of their garage. Luke helps her – has been helping her as long as he can remember. Sometimes a smaller pair of hands is needed, and he’s always been good at fixing things. People aren’t as easy as machines, but Aunt Beru knows what to do, and Luke likes the chance to chatter as much as he wants. Chatter is good, in the surgeries. It keeps people distracted from the operation, and makes everything go smoother.

The people who come to them tell stories, too: stories of lost children and secret families, stories of Tena and Maru and Ebra the prophets, stories of Akar Hinil the pirate, countless stories of a trickster with Luke’s name.

At the end of every story, Ekkreth turns into a bird and flies away, laughing at Depur as they go. Luke hears an echo of that laughter in the voice of every runaway who comes to them to have their chains cut, and he hears it echo again each time their guests leave, like birds flying away.

 _Skywalker_ , says the voice of the wind that gusts through his hair. _Skywalker_ , says the voice of skittering sand beneath his feet. _Skywalker_ , the deep hollow voice of the desert says, echoing like a heartbeat in his bones. _Do you know what your name means?_

*

He learns to fly first in his dreams, long before he sneaks into the garage one afternoon and borrows Uncle Owen’s swoop bike.

He’s still too short to reach the pedals easily, but a few bits of scrap metal and some jerba cord fix that easily enough. Sitting on the bike feels like coming home, home to a place he’s never been. The desert sings in his ears and he guns the engine without a second thought.

Later, when he’s supposed to be sitting in his room reflecting on why what he did was a bad idea, Luke sneaks back toward the common room, just close enough to hear his aunt and uncle talking.

Uncle Owen is worried. What if someone notices? What if the boy draws attention? If the inspectors come, or worse –

But Luke can hear the smile in his aunt’s voice as she says, “He’s a Skywalker, Owen. Nothing you can do will keep him on the ground.”

*

Sometimes, Luke dreams.

Not the pleasant dreams of flying or swimming that his friends talk about, though he has those too. And not the nightmares his friends describe, either, some that seem silly on waking and others that are no less terrifying in the light of the suns. Luke has only ever had one nightmare, as long as he can remember: a dream of fire. It licks over his skin and chars his bones and he wakes gasping for breath that seems to sear his throat and yet provides no relief.

When he’s younger, he goes running to his aunt and uncle every time he has the dream, and they do their best to reassure him. But as he grows older, he can see that it disturbs them. Not the dream itself, but the fact that he still has it, and has it so often.

Once, when he was five, Luke burned his hand on the cooker. It was a minor burn, healed fully in a matter of days. He’s had a few other, similarly minor burns since, but nothing worse. Nothing at all like his dreams of fire.

He’s fourteen years old the first time the dream changes. A woman comes, with wise, sad eyes as brown as the desert and a face carved like the mountains, and lifts him out of the fire and into the sky. The desert wind roars around them. Luke breathes deep and freely, and looks around him to see that in every place where the fire burned, green plants are now growing.

 _Skywalker_ , says the woman in a voice like the wind. _Lukka. Do you know what your name means?_

He wakes to the smell of rain.

*

Luke is eighteen when Biggs goes to the Academy. He doesn’t have any trouble getting accepted, which they both laugh about for longer than they probably should. The Empire obviously knows nothing about Tatooine, if they’d accept someone named Darklighter.

Luke wants to go too. It’s all he’s wanted for years now, though he has no love for the Empire. How could he love a government of slavers? But he and Biggs have a plan. They’ll go to the Academy, receive what everyone agrees is the best training for pilots in the galaxy – and then defect to the Alliance. That’s been their plan since they were nine years old, when Luke sang for a woman named Bentu who told him, even as Aunt Beru’s scalpel danced carefully across her flesh, that she planned to join the Imperial Navy as a spy for the Alliance, because the Rebellion was the Alliance to Restore the Republic, and even if the Empire was overthrown and the Republic restored, nothing on Tatooine would change.

“We need our people on the inside,” Bentu had said as she packed her bag in the secret hours of the night. “Freedom won’t be given, by the Empire or by the Alliance. We have to take it.”

Luke and Biggs have a plan to take it.

Or, well, the beginnings of a plan, anyway. The first step is to graduate from the Academy and then defect. After that…they’ll figure it out.

But only Biggs is going to the Academy. Because Luke’s aunt and uncle won’t let him go.

He argues with them about it, so often that they’re all sick of it, and in the week after Biggs leaves, none of them say much of anything to each other. It’s new and uncomfortable – Luke can’t remember a time he’s ever felt so alone.

The silence stretches, until one night Luke goes out to the garage, planning to tinker with…something, just to distract his thoughts, and he finds Aunt Beru there, humming an old song as she examines a malfunctioning vaporator coil.

 _Tena light the fires_ , she sings. _The night is drawing in._

It’s one of the oldest and most common work songs, simple and repetitive, with a seemingly simple and repetitive story to match. Night is coming. It’s time to light the candles, and then to continue working.

But Luke and Beru both know the truth of the song. The night is the hope of slaves. The night brings freedom. And Tena is no simple candle-lighter, but the great prophet, she who walked in the desert with Ar-Amu, Tena the Unfettered with the skin of a dragon who went back, time and time again, to free her people from slavery. Until finally the Hutts captured her. But she was not executed. Ar-Amu’s fire fell from heaven and Tena was caught up, blazing like a third sun, and Ar-Amu took her away, free forever.

_Tena light the fires. The night is drawing in._

Luke steps fully into the garage, and without a word Aunt Beru hands him the vaporator coil. He’s good with them, naturally so. Like his grandmother, Aunt Beru says. Like his father.

“Tell me why you want to go to the Academy,” she says. “Tell me why you want to join the Imperial fleet.”

Luke winces. He hasn’t yet told them the truth, afraid they’d think it’s too dangerous. He should have realized a lie would be worse.

“I don’t,” he admits, his eyes trained on the vaporator coil. “I want to join the Alliance. Biggs and I, we were planning to defect.”

Aunt Beru is silent for a long moment. She’s moved on to the next coil, this one less damaged than the one Luke is working with, and there’s something soothing and simple in just working quietly together.

But finally she says, again, “Tell me why.”

 _Lukka_ , whispers the voice of the desert in the silent spaces. _Do you know what your name means?_

“Because I want to help people,” Luke says. He offers a hesitantly teasing smile. “You’re always saying that the biggest problem in the galaxy is that nobody helps each other.”

Aunt Beru sighs, and then she reaches out to ruffle his hair like he’s a child again. “Yes,” she says. “And you do help, Luke.” She gestures minutely behind them, in the direction of the hidden surgery. “But…I’ll discuss this with Owen. Not this year, but maybe the next…”

That’s enough for Luke, at least for now. He can wait one season more. But not forever. The voice of the wind sings in his blood. _Skywalker_ , it names him, and no Skywalker can remain on the ground for long.

*

The revelation that his father was a Jedi is both a surprise and, somehow, not a surprise at all.

Luke has always known that his father was a freedman. A navigator on a spice freighter, his aunt and uncle told him. They didn’t say much else about him, but the image in Luke’s mind has always been almost a human version of Akar Hinil, the celebrated Twi’lek pirate who fought the slavers. He’s never seen a holo of his father, so the Anakin Skywalker of his daydreams looks remarkably like the way Luke used to imagine himself looking as an adult. Even as he’s grown older and found that reality doesn’t match his youthful imaginings, the image of his father hasn’t changed.

And now there’s this: Ben Kenobi, not a crazy old wizard but a Jedi Knight. The only home Luke has ever known, burned and desecrated, his aunt and uncle’s bodies consumed by the fire that haunts his dreams. And his father, his freedman father, was a Jedi.

Ben says that the Jedi were the protectors of peace and justice, before the dark times. And Luke’s father was one of them.

His father’s lightsaber is hanging now from Luke’s belt. The ashes of everyone and everything Luke knows and loves are smoldering still, and a deep well of anger opens inside him. His father, the mother he knows almost nothing about, and now his aunt and uncle – the Empire has taken them all.

_The biggest problem in the galaxy is that nobody helps each other._

There’s nothing more he can do for Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen. There’s very little he can do for the people who once followed the freedom trail here, except to get word to Imer Moonspinner that the Lars farm can no longer be a safe haven. But there is something he can do, perhaps, for the princess in Artoo-Detoo’s message. And maybe that will serve to avenge all those the Empire has stolen. Maybe it will at least be a beginning. He can only hope.

“I want to learn the ways of the Force and go with you to Alderaan,” he tells Ben. “There’s nothing here for me now.”

And that’s true. The dead are free and he can do nothing for them. And he’s already taken from the homestead the one thing that’s needful. At the bottom of his small bag, beneath a few changes of clothes, there’s a set of surgical tools and a scanner.

*

The princess is named Leia, and when Luke walks into her cell he thinks, for a moment, that she really is a dragon. She’s a prisoner under sentence of death, but she sits there as fierce and furious as the Mighty One herself, and it’s enough to steal the words right from Luke’s mouth. 

“Aren’t you a little short for a stormtrooper?” the dragon-princess snaps, and Luke comes back to the present, fumbling with his helmet and his explanation.

Their escape is harrowing and terrifying and, if he’s completely honest, more than a little thrilling. Luke’s dodged the Hutts and their enforcers before, but now he’s in the belly of a massive Imperial war machine, entirely surrounded by people who want him dead, and yet he’s still free and still fighting and it’s even beginning to feel like he’s _winning_ , like this is an Ekkreth story and he and his friends are going to turn into a bird and fly away, laughing in the face of the Empire.

That’s when he sees Darth Vader for the first time.

There’s never a moment when he has to wonder who the huge, droid-like black shape clashing blades with Ben Kenobi is. Later, much later, as he’s sitting listlessly in a medbay testing the sensitivity of his new cybernetic fingers, he’ll remember that moment that wasn’t, and he’ll think that maybe some part of him always knew.

He screams a denial as the red blade falls, and everything that comes after is a blur of laser fire and targeting computers and explosions and one brief, quiet moment when the dragon-princess wraps a blanket around his shoulders and tells him she’s sorry for his loss. It will be hours yet before he’s able to really process that, before he realizes the magnitude of her own loss and the immense and terrible strength of her heart.

He finds Biggs again on the Rebel base. The reunion is unlooked for, and so all the more devastating. Biggs tells Luke what he knows about the Death Star, the Empire’s new superweapon that Luke and his friends have just escaped from. Luke tells Biggs about Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen and the burned farmstead, and they steal a brief moment away from the bustle of the base to make the Vigil for the Lost together.

But there’s no real time to mourn. They’ve been tracked, just as Leia thought they would be.

Luke takes very little with him in the X-Wing the Alliance assigned him less than an hour ago. Of course, he won’t need much going into a space battle, but for all his bravado during the briefing, Luke knows there’s a decent chance he won’t be coming back, and some things are important.

He brings Artoo, of course, because Artoo wants to go, and Luke couldn’t refuse him. He can’t imagine working with another droid at this point, either.

He brings his father’s lightsaber, because it’s the only thing of his father’s he’s ever received, and because he knows three things about his father: he was a freedman, he was a pilot, and he was a Jedi. Luke is fighting for all of those things now, and he hopes his father’s spirit will be with him.

But it’s not his father’s voice he hears, urging him to turn off his targeting computer and trust the Force. It’s not the voice of the desert, either. It’s Ben.

Luke breathes a wordless prayer and shuts off the computer.

The entire universe narrows to a single point of focus. The exhaust port, only two meters wide and fast approaching. There are enemy fighters closing behind him, and an ever-narrowing window of time in which he can act before everything will be over.

Like shooting womp rats in Beggar’s Canyon back home, he thinks, and fires the shot.

*

After the celebrations, there is time to mourn. This time, Luke makes the Vigil for the Lost alone. One of Biggs’ squad mates, a woman named Brin, brings him a small box. She squeezes his shoulder in sympathy before she leaves, and Luke offers condolences of his own.

There’s not much in the box, and most of it probably looks like junk to anyone who doesn’t know Tatooine. A collection of miscellaneous small parts. Several lengths of jerba cord. A chunk of flaky red rock that Luke knows comes from Beggar’s Canyon. A snippet of japor, carved with symbols of protection. And a scanner made of cobbled scraps.

Biggs was freeborn, like Luke, but like Luke, his grandmother was a freedwoman. She still lives on a moisture farm along the freedom trail, but Luke has no way to contact her.

He wraps one of the lengths of jerba around his wrist and hesitates only a moment before tucking the japor into his pocket. The rest goes back into the box, to be given to Biggs’ grandmother if ever he returns to Tatooine. When he left, he’d thought he would never go back. But this changes things.

*

Hoth is a desert too, for all it’s covered in snow. Luke thinks about this sometimes, when he’s out on patrol, or when his fellow pilots grumble about the weather and Wedge complains that he grew up on Alderaan and Luke grew up in a blazing desert, so by all rights Luke ought to have more trouble with the cold and it’s completely ridiculous that Wedge is the one constantly shivering.

Once, Leia overhears this repeated argument. She and Wedge are cousins, though three times removed. At first Luke was surprised by the strikingly informal way Wedge treats the princess, and he’s pretty sure Wedge contrived to keep the mystery going for a while because it amused him. But eventually Hobbie clued Luke in, and now he’s more than used to their banter.

“You grew up in the city,” Leia tells Wedge with teasing disdain. “City people can never handle the cold.”

There’s a forced lightness to her voice that’s always present when she talks about Alderaan, but there’s a genuine spark of humor in her eyes, too. She sees the question in Luke’s and adds, “Yes, technically I grew up in the city too. But my father’s parents were mountain herders, and every time Mom wanted to escape the palace we’d go up there. I remember –” She cuts herself off abruptly, and there’s a terrible moment where the ghost of an entire planet seems to steal all the air from the room and Luke feels like a sacrilegious outsider intruding on a secret and holy grief.

Then Leia shakes herself, and Wedge offers a grimace of a smile. “You see what I have to put up with, Luke?” he says with an exaggerated sigh. “She’s royalty, _and_ she’s tougher than me.”

Luke laughs, too, less because it’s funny and more because Aunt Beru used to say that the surest weapon against evil is laughter. Sometimes, when he’s out on a long and painfully uneventful patrol, he likes to imagine meeting Vader, or even the Emperor himself, and laughing in his face.

“That’s no surprise,” Luke says. “I’m pretty sure Leia is tougher than anyone.”

He still thinks of her as the dragon-princess, though he’s never told her that. It would be difficult to explain to someone who’s never been to Tatooine, and he’s not entirely sure of how she would take it. Her name is Alderaanian, of course, and one of the few pieces of Alderaan she has left. He doesn’t want a coincidence of language to take that from her.

*

Hoth is a desert, and maybe that makes him a little bit cocky. He knows how to survive in a desert, after all.

But the dangers of an ice desert are not the same as the dangers of Tatooine.

“That’s two you owe me, junior,” says Han, easy and teasing. He won’t ever collect, Luke thinks, but that doesn’t make it any less true. It just raises Luke’s estimation of the man he once thought cared only for himself. And Luke is very aware, even as he teases Han in turn, that they survived a storm together. That the law of the desert ties them together now, brothers through the storm.

It’s the law of the desert, too, that makes Luke trust the apparition of Ben Kenobi.

He’s heard Ben’s voice before, of course. Only once, in the trenches above the Death Star, but his guidance had been vital then and Luke has felt his absence keenly since. He wants to be a Jedi like his father, wants it more than anything, but until now he hasn’t known where to turn. How can he learn, with Ben gone?

But now there is another Jedi. And he must be a great Jedi, Luke thinks, if he taught Ben.

He doesn’t tell anyone about what he saw out in the wastes. Luke trusts his vision absolutely, but he’s got no illusions that anyone else will. He saw Ben while he was half-delirious and slowly freezing to death. Those are not optimal conditions for being believed.

So instead he does his part to ensure that the base will be safely evacuated, and then he splits away from the rest of the fleet and makes his way to Dagobah.

*

Yoda is not what Luke expected, though truth be told he couldn’t say what he was expecting really. A great warrior, though that idea is pretty nebulous, too. Someone more like Ben, maybe. Someone old and wise, but with just an edge of danger, too.

Yoda probably _is_ dangerous, though, even if he doesn’t look or sound it. Anyone that perfectly dedicated to a cause or a system of belief must be. Yoda is in hiding from the Empire, his life entirely given to the Force, but Luke recognizes in him something not unlike the fire that drives his rebel friends.

Luke listens eagerly to everything Yoda will tell him, whether about the Force or Jedi philosophy or sometimes even about Ben (Obi-Wan, Yoda always calls him) or, most rarely of all, a brief mention of his father. He was a powerful Jedi, Yoda says. Luke has learned enough by now to know that what Yoda probably means is “strong in the Force,” but that still doesn’t stop him from imagining his powerful father in Tatooine terms: free, unfettered, breaking chains wherever he went. Someday, Luke will be that too. A Jedi like his father before him.

*

What Yoda calls his failure in the cave haunts Luke, though maybe not for the reasons his Jedi teacher might hope. It reminds him of something Aunt Beru used to say years ago, something he’s ashamed to admit he’d mostly forgotten.

“You’re the Free Skywalker,” she’d say. “You call things, and people, by their names, no matter what the Masters say.”

“And what if I don’t know the name, Aunt Beru?” he remembers asking once.

He remembers how she knelt down beside him and looked him in the eye for a long, piercing moment, and how soft but fierce her voice was when she answered, “Then you learn it. You learn it, and the story that goes with it. And you learn why it was hidden, and who benefits from keeping it hidden.”

Luke is still thinking about that as he stirs his soup listlessly that night. Yoda had refused to teach him anything else that day after his failure, and Luke’s pretty sure he’s meant to be meditating on that failure, on what he did wrong. Bringing his lightsaber (his father’s lightsaber) to the cave was wrong, obviously. Yoda emphasized that pretty strongly. Luke just isn’t sure _why_. Would Vader not have come if he hadn’t brought it?

Or would Vader have worn a different face?

 _You call things, and people, by their names, Luke_ , Aunt Beru whispers through his memory. And more distant still there’s the voice of the desert, a voice he hasn’t heard much since he came to Dagobah. _Skywalker_ , the desert sings, _do you know what your name means?_

Who is Darth Vader? Luke knows both his name and his story; Obi-Wan told him. He’s a Jedi, and he was Ben’s student before he turned to evil. He killed Luke’s father, and many other Jedi too. He killed Ben. Luke saw him do that.

So why can’t he stop thinking about Aunt Beru’s words, or his own face inside that terrible death mask?

*

 _Oh_ , he thinks, numbly, both arms but only one hand wrapped around himself and shivering uncontrollably in a makeshift medcot. _That’s why._

*

It would be easier, Luke thinks later still, if he could just believe that Vader was lying, and that Ben, that _Obi-Wan_ , had told him the full truth. It would be a good lie, surely. One designed to throw him off kilter, to make him question his allegiance to the Jedi and maybe even to the Alliance. Deceit is the way of the Dark Side, Master Yoda said. So of course Vader was lying.

The problem is that Luke knows that isn’t true.

 _Ek masa ton ipa_ , Vader said, in a language Luke hadn’t heard since Biggs died. His voice was as deep and as hollow as the desert.

The desert has never lied to Luke, and he knows that Vader hasn’t, either.

Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru lied to protect him, Luke is certain of that. And, maybe, they lied because they really didn’t know. Aunt Beru especially always spoke fondly of his father. Luke can’t imagine her doing that if she’d known…

But Obi-Wan. Obi-Wan certainly knew, and he just as certainly lied, and Luke just wants to know why. Why didn’t Ben tell him?

But Ben is silent. He won’t answer when Luke calls.

Vader isn’t silent.

His voice in Luke’s mind sounds like an echo out of deep space. He always uses Luke’s name, the name his parents gave him. _Lukka_ , the voice of the desert echoes back. _Lukka. Do you know what your name means?_

Vader says his name like it’s a prayer.

Most of the time, Luke doesn’t answer. But in the first moments of shock above Bespin, he did. And without even consciously thinking about it, he’d followed Aunt Beru’s advice and named Vader “Father.”

He can’t take that back now. That is, he can’t _make_ himself take it back, though he doesn’t quite know why. He just keeps thinking about that moment in the cave on Dagobah. His failure in the cave, Yoda called it.

His failure. As if all the lies are inconsequential, and Luke alone has failed, because he broke the mask and revealed the truth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Amatakka translations:
> 
>  _Luke_ : free  
>  _Leia_ : the Mighty One (a name for Krayt Dragon)  
>  _ek masa ton ipa_ : I am your father.


	2. whose other side is salvation

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to [starfoozle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/starfoozle/pseuds/starfoozle) for science help with the properties of desert glass.

Planning Han’s rescue and getting used to his new hand keep Luke occupied, at least for a while. But Chewie is almost unapproachable in his worry, and Leia and Lando both seem to alternate between fits of frenzied planning and quiet moments of something that’s not quite grief, not quite guilt, and not quite something that can be named at all.

He doesn’t know Lando well enough to say much about him, yet, though the man seems both clever and kind. And Leia…most days, if they’re not talking about the rescue, Luke doesn’t know what to say to her. He doesn’t know what to say to anyone, really.

Darth Vader is his father. The words still sound in his mind every time he closes his eyes, echoing in the deep hollow voice of the desert. Luke hasn’t told anyone.

But back here on Tatooine, it’s impossible to ignore.

It only gets worse once Leia, Chewie, and Lando have all set off to play their parts in the plan and Luke is left with Artoo and Threepio. He’ll have to send them off soon, too. But there’s something he has to do first.

His father’s lightsaber was lost with his hand on Bespin. Vader’s lightsaber, some part of him thinks, and then he thinks, no. His father’s lightsaber. _You’re the Free Skywalker_ , the ghost of Aunt Beru whispers on the wind. _You call things, and people, by their names._

The scream that rises in him is half a sob. What is Vader’s name? What is his father’s name? A freedman, a Jedi, a pilot – no. Not a liberator, not the fighter for justice Luke has always imagined, but a monster, and worse than a monster. A slaver. _Depukrekta_. A repairer of chains. The Empire is a government of slavers and Vader is the face of the Empire.

_No_ , whispers the desert, in Aunt Beru’s voice. _You are the Free Skywalker. You call things, and people, by their names. No matter what the Masters say._

He’s gone through all the contents of Ben Kenobi’s old house, but there isn’t much to find. There’s instructions on building a lightsaber, and the parts to do it, and Luke thinks, a little viciously, that it’s awfully _convenient_ , finding those things exactly when he needs them.

But he takes them anyway, because the truth is he _does_ need them. And constructing his new lightsaber gives him something to do with his hands, something to focus him in the Force while he thinks.

The building of a lightsaber is an important step on the journey to becoming a Jedi. Luke knows this, because he reads it in the instructions Ben left behind, instructions he suspects may have been written specifically for him. Certainly Ben wouldn’t have needed them.

His new lightsaber doesn’t look anything like the one he lost. He doesn’t have the right parts to imitate it, and he’s not sure he’d want to anyway. That lightsaber was Vader’s – his father’s – Vader’s – _someone else’s_ , and this lightsaber will be his alone.

The supplies Ben left behind include a focusing crystal. The crystal, his instructions say, is the heart of the lightsaber, and the lightsaber is the heart of the Jedi. The crystal Luke finds in Ben’s home is blue, like Ben’s own lightsaber. Like Luke’s father’s lightsaber.

Luke leaves the crystal where he finds it, asks Artoo and Threepio to keep watch on the hut, and goes out into the desert.

It takes him two days to find the thing he only half knows he’s looking for. He’s following a feeling, really, and that feeling is far from clear.

On that first day, he wanders about, more or less aimlessly, listening for the voice of the desert and doing his best to ignore the voice of his father. It’s hard, because sometimes he almost can’t tell them apart. _Lukka_ , says the deep hollow voice of his father. _Come with me._ And again, _Lukka_ , says the deep hollow voice of the desert. _Come to me. Come and learn what your name means._

That night, there is a sandstorm. It blows up sudden and wild and fierce out of the immensity of the open desert, and Luke is nearly caught by it. He staggers, gasping, toward the dimly guessed line of solid rock before him, and is surprised to find it much closer than he feared. There’s a cave there, little more than a hole really, but enough. He shelters there through the night, cloth wrapped carefully over his mouth and nose, shying away from the wild lightning strikes that periodically illuminate the brown world, and wonders if he hasn’t made a terrible mistake. They’ll be waiting for him at Jabba’s Palace. He doesn’t have time for this.

But the storm blows away with the night, and in the half-light of early morning, with one sun peaking above the horizon and the other still hidden in darkness, Luke steps out of his cave and stares.

All around him, littering the sand like stars in the depths of space, are glittering shards of desert glass.

*

The lightsaber is the heart of the Jedi, Ben’s notes say. If that’s true, Luke thinks, contemplating his collection of parts and the several chunks of desert glass laid out before him, then a lightsaber should reflect the user. It should tell a story.

His father’s lightsaber told a story. Luke can still see the lightsaber in his mind’s eye, chromed and bright but worn with use and age. A unique design, unlike any of the suggested patterns in the instructions Ben left for him. But built around a standard core: the Kyber crystals that power all Jedi lightsabers.

For the first time, Luke considers what it must mean, that his father was a Jedi. Is a Jedi still, though he fights for the Empire. A Jedi and a slaver.

Who were the Jedi? The defenders of peace and justice, Ben told him. The defenders of democracy and the Republic.

But Luke’s father was born under the Republic that the Jedi defended. And he was born a slave, like his mother before him, and hers, and hers, and back and back. Was that the Republic’s justice?

Luke has heard Leia talk, more than once, about how Palpatine usurped the Republic and waged war against the institutions of democracy, against the Senate and the Jedi.

But he also remembers the one time he visited Mos Espa with his aunt and uncle when he was twelve. They’d gone to the marketplace, and Luke, bored with the prospect of spending even another minute haggling over rugs, had wandered off to explore. Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen found him three hours later, still staring at the auction block he’d seen dozens of people paraded across.

There were blood stains on the block, and thick iron rings for securing the merchandise on display. A sign just beside Luke proudly proclaimed that this market had been in business for over a hundred years.

He remembers Aunt Beru’s quiet gasp, and Uncle Owen’s rough, warm hand on his shoulder. He remembers asking if his grandmother had ever stood there, or his father. He remembers, just as clearly, not asking if any of the blood stains might be theirs.

And he remembers that Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen offered him comfort, but no answers.

There are no answers, he thinks now. Not in Ben’s notes on lightsaber construction, and not in all the wisdom of Master Yoda, and not even, perhaps, in the Force itself. All he hears when he seeks the Force’s guidance is his father’s voice, deep and hollow and breathing his name like a prayer. _Lukka. Come with me._

And the voice of the desert, which offers no answers but only more questions. _Lukka. Do you know what your name means?_

He knows one thing. He is Luke Skywalker. That name, at least, no one can take from him.

The lightsaber he gives to Artoo before sending him off is carved from the bones of the desert. And when Luke himself goes at last to Jabba’s palace to confront the Master of Masters of Tatooine, he’s wearing black.

*

Later, perhaps, he’ll wonder what he would have done, if Jabba had actually been willing to negotiate. Could he have made a deal with a slaver for his friends’ freedom, and left everyone else there? And is that the kind of question a Jedi has to ask? Would Ben or Yoda have asked that question?

Does he actually want to know the answer to that?

Luke choked those two guards, and he doesn’t regret it. He’d have choked Jabba, too, he thinks, if Leia hadn’t beaten him to it. But he’s glad she did.

She’s Unfettered now, the dragon-princess become a dragon indeed, but Luke hasn’t found a way to tell her that yet. To tell her that she’s part of his culture now, initiated in the worst way possible.

The sailbarge went up in flames, and most of Jabba’s enforcers with it, and Luke doesn’t regret it at all. He’s not sure what he feels, except that it’s closer to joy than remorse, and he’s certain that if he told Master Yoda, the old Jedi would be very concerned indeed.

He says nothing about Tatooine when he returns to Dagobah.

His teacher’s home feels different this time. And it’s not just that Yoda looks suddenly weakened and horribly, inescapably _old_. There’s an air of musty, evaporated mystery to the place. Where once Luke felt like a bumbling novice immersed in a new world both wondrous and terrifying, now he feels almost as tired as Yoda looks. A veil has been lifted away from his old dreams. Or perhaps a mask.

There is no great mystery here, he realizes, and it leaves him angry, yes, but more than that it leaves him sad. Yoda will not meet his eyes when Luke demands the truth. The Jedi Master turns away, muttering about rest.

For the first time, Luke addresses him without the title he has always used before, the title he’s never allowed himself to think too deeply about. Some tiny, rebellious part of him now wonders what his father thought of it, years ago when everything was different.

“Yoda,” he says. “I must know.”

But he already knows, of course. Yoda’s, “Your father he is,” is only confirmation that Ben and Yoda know, too. That they have known all along.

And they were never planning to tell him.

When he sees Ben in physical form again for the first time since Hoth, Luke has a new address for him, too. It seems right, now. He is the Free Skywalker. He calls people by their names.

“Obi-Wan,” he says. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

A certain point of view, Obi-Wan says. He makes it sound reasonable, too, and he sounds every bit as weary as Yoda, even now. The deception was necessary to protect Luke. And his twin sister.

There’s no question in Luke’s mind who his sister must be. He’s known her for a dragon from the moment he saw her, curled up and ferocious in that Death Star prison cell. Leia the Mighty One, whose name is not a coincidence after all. Leia the Unfettered, twice born of Tatooine, though she doesn’t know it. Leia, his sister.

“The Emperor knew, as I did, that if Anakin were to have any offspring, they would be a threat to him,” Obi-Wan had said, and Luke still wonders, a little viciously, which “him” Obi-Wan meant.

“I can’t kill my own father,” Luke told him then, and as he said it the certainty grew in him: this is what he’s been trained for. This is what he’s meant to do, what they meant for him to do. Yoda said only that Luke must confront Vader again, but Obi-Wan was more direct. And, this time at least, more honest.

“Then the Emperor has already won,” he said, with all the weariness of Yoda’s nine hundred years. “You were our last hope.”

Luke is still thinking about that as he rendezvouses with the Rebel fleet. What if Obi-Wan and Yoda are right? What if the only way to free the galaxy is to kill the monster who was once his father? Is he willing to do that? And can he live with himself if he is?

*

He still doesn’t know the answer, but he volunteers for the mission to Endor anyway. He tells himself that he’s following a feeling, that the Rebellion needs him on this mission and the Force is guiding his decision, but when he senses Vader’s presence – his father’s presence – on the command ship, he knows the truth.

Yoda said that Luke must confront Vader. Obi-Wan was more honest when he said that Luke must kill him.

On the moon of Endor, Luke chooses to surrender to him.

He can tell that he’s surprised his father, though Vader is doing his best to hide that fact. But perhaps his surprise is understandable. The last time they met, after all, Luke had let himself fall into a bottomless pit rather than remain another moment with Vader. Now he’s turned himself in, and he can tell his father is trying to work out his reasoning. There’s nothing strategic to be gained from this, and no obvious way for Luke to escape from the situation he’s voluntarily walked into.

There’s no way for him to escape at all, Luke is pretty sure. At least, not alone.

It’s the one possibility Vader doesn’t seem to have considered. Luke can feel his father’s confusion, the desperate edge to his emotions, and beneath that a deep, ancient despair.

For just a moment, he’s back in the market in Mos Espa, standing frozen in front of the bloodied auction block. The silence between him and his father stretches with the weight of centuries. _Skywalker_ , the voice of the desert whispers through his bones. _Lukka. Do you know what your name means?_

“So, you have accepted the truth,” Vader says, his voice as deep as the desert, and as hollow, in spite of the note of satisfaction there.

But that note is there. It’s enough. Luke seizes it, and twists the knife.

“I’ve accepted the truth that you were once Anakin Skywalker, my father,” he says, his gaze fixed firmly on Vader’s blank, unchanging mask. Always before, he’d thought it looked angry, like some sort of vengeful spirit of gloating death. But he’s never been this close before.

Perhaps it’s only a strange effect of industrial lighting against the forest night. Perhaps it’s less even than that. The mask is still skeletal, but the man who wears it now holds no terror. For the first time, Luke notices the chain at Vader’s throat.

“That name no longer has any meaning for me,” Vader says.

He intends it as a denial, Luke thinks. A rejection. That’s what he wants Luke to hear. But he says it in Amatakka, and the language of the desert is not suited to lies.

The name Anakin means the one who brings the rain. The one who brings freedom. But Luke’s hands are bound and there is a chain around his father’s neck. He wonders, for the first time, who holds the key.

“It is the name of your true self,” Luke says, staring at the red lenses of his father’s mask and refusing to look away. “You’ve only forgotten.”

_Keekta-du_. Luke wields the word like a weapon, and Vader, it seems, hasn’t forgotten everything. He flinches, just a little, but Luke doesn’t miss it, or the way he tries to hide it. The sudden hope that surges in him is sharp enough to draw blood.

“I know there is good in you,” Luke breathes. “The Emperor hasn’t driven it from you fully. That’s why you couldn’t destroy me. That’s why you won’t bring me to your Emperor now.”

His gaze is still trained unerringly on the tinted lenses of his father’s mask. For the first time in his life, Luke thinks there is nothing in all the universe he’s afraid of.

It’s Vader who looks away.

He twists Luke’s lightsaber in his hands, examining it with a critical eye, and Luke might almost be surprised at the obvious evasion, except that it’s not really an evasion at all, is it? The lightsaber carved from the bones of the desert looks somehow awkward in his father’s gloved hands, as though he doesn’t quite know how to hold it. Luke wonders if Vader can sense the desert fire there, if it calls to him in a language he still remembers, in spite of all his denials.

“I see you have constructed a new lightsaber,” Vader rumbles. The blade burns green between them, green as desert glass.

Vader says something else, but Luke is not at all interested in the Emperor and his foretellings. He watches his father extinguish the lightsaber and blurts, “Come with me.”

Vader goes still. “Obi-Wan once thought as you do,” he breathes, and it’s almost a murmur, even with the vocoder. Luke thinks of Obi-Wan’s words on Dagobah, and wonders if that’s true. If it ever was, Obi-Wan has long since ceased to think that way.

Maybe Obi-Wan is right.

“You don’t know the power of the Dark Side,” says Vader.

Luke stands, caught in the horrible gravity of those words, all thought and certainty sheared away. Even the voice of the desert is silent, and in that emptiness, Vader’s words seem to echo back and consume themselves.

“Power” in Basic is an ambiguous word, and Luke is certain that’s the word his father would have chosen, had they been speaking in Basic. But they’re still speaking in Amatakka, and the word Vader uses is _para_. And there is only one way to interpret that.

Vader’s next words only confirm that truth.

_“Ek toparaka em Depura,”_ he says. “I _must_ obey my Master.”

Luke breathes in. His hands are resting, bound, on the railing before him, and if he closes his eyes, he knows what he’ll see. The old auction block in Mos Espa, with its endless parade of human chattel. His father, his grandmother, her mother and hers and hers and back and back and back.

He is the Free Skywalker. The first Skywalker ever born free. _Don’t forget_ , whispers Aunt Beru’s voice across the vastness of space.

He has never been more keenly aware of who he is. Luke Skywalker, pilot, Jedi, freedom fighter. The freeborn son of a slave.

He breathes out. “I will not turn,” he says, and he can hear desperation and certainty mingled in his own voice. “And you’ll be forced to kill me.”

“If that is your destiny,” says Vader, but he’s bluffing. He has to be, Luke thinks with a wild edge of panic. He can’t really mean that.

“Search your feelings, Father,” he says, and it’s as much a confession as a demand. “You can’t do this. I feel the conflict within you. Let go of your hate!”

The feeling of panic increases to a fever pitch, and Luke feels an unlooked for, almost perverse spark of hope as he realizes that feeling _isn’t his_.

He clings to that realization, to what it must mean, holds it tight with bleeding fingers even as the waves of his father’s despair beat over him and he hears Vader say, “It is too late for me, son.” There’s a moment’s silence, and then, as if by rote, that deep hollow voice adds, “The Emperor will show you the true nature of the Force. He is your Master now.”

Luke breathes. The air is thick with despair and choking panic and a bleak, bone-deep sense of resignation, and he knows none of those feelings are his.

He is the Free Skywalker, and Vader – Vader who has always said his name like a prayer – surely knows what that means. Luke will never acknowledge the Emperor as Master. But Vader… Vader must obey his Master. So long as that remains true…

“Then my father is truly dead,” says Luke. He hears the hitch in Vader’s breathing, but doesn’t acknowledge it. The stormtroopers are coming to surround him now, to take him to his father’s Master, and he’s out of opportunities to run.

That’s what Vader – what his _father_ – wanted for him, he thinks now. He wanted Luke to run. To leave him behind and save himself. In his own way, maybe, he was trying to save his son.

And that’s why Luke won’t leave. Even now. In spite of his biting words, in spite of his purported rejection. They both know that rejection was no more honest than Vader’s assertion that he would kill Luke.

And so they will face the Emperor. Both of them, together. And there are really only two ways that confrontation can end.

_Dukkra ba dukkra_ , Luke thinks, smiling grimly to himself as he’s led toward Vader’s waiting shuttle. Maybe his father has forgotten, but he hasn’t. He is the Free Skywalker, and so he will be…one way or the other.

*

The Master of the Galactic Empire is a shriveled, colorless old man in a coarse black robe with eyes as golden and cruel as any Hutt’s. He greets Luke with a croaking mockery of a smile. The Force around him reels, the air fetid and thick with an oily smoke that chokes Luke’s lungs and stings his eyes.

He watches his father bow, and bites back a scream. The Emperor seems to hear it anyway. There’s a hideous laughter in his gilded eyes.

His father’s Master waves a languid hand. “You no longer need those,” he says, and the binders at Luke’s wrists fall away. With a sharp command he sends his guards from the room.

And now it is just Luke, his father, and the man his father names Depur. And Luke’s hands are unbound.

He knows better than to make any move. Whatever else he may be, the Emperor is no fool, and more importantly, Luke can tell he is not the kind of man who will ever permit himself to be in anything less than perfect control of a situation. He knows he is more truly a prisoner now, with his binders loosed, than he ever was when bound by Vader.

“I’m looking forward to completing your training,” the Emperor says with uninhibited glee. “In time you will call me Master.”

From the corner of his eye, Luke sees his father glance sharply at him, just for a moment before his gaze snaps back to his Master. But Luke notices, and he knows the Emperor does too.

He allows himself just the hint of a smile. “You’re gravely mistaken. You won’t convert me as you did my father.”

For just an instant, the old man on the throne seems startled. His yellow eyes blink in slow disdain, but Luke refuses to look away. The Emperor isn’t used to defiance.

That’s just too bad, Luke thinks, with an edge of hysteria. He’s not sure if the feeling is his or his father’s.

The Emperor rises from his throne.

It’s ridiculous, but the first thing Luke thinks is that the man is shorter than he expected. Standing beside Vader he must look absolutely miniscule. But then, Luke can’t imagine they stand side by side very often, if the height of that dais is anything to go by.

Biggs would probably say the Emperor is compensating for something.

Okay, Luke thinks. _That_ twist of hysteria is definitely his.

“Oh no, my young Jedi,” the Emperor hisses, his eyes boring into Luke’s. There’s laughter in their depths, and it crawls over Luke’s skin like an oil slick over water. He can’t quite hold back his shudder.

“You will find that it is you who are mistaken,” the Emperor says. “About a great many things.”

Before Luke can say anything, his father steps forward, offering Luke’s lightsaber to his Master.

The Emperor turns the hilt over in his hands. There’s a momentary but shockingly clear look of disgust on his face, before he turns back to Luke with a sneer. “Ah, yes, a Jedi’s weapon,” he scoffs. “Much like your father’s.” He pauses then, waiting for something, but whatever it is Luke decides he won’t give it. He holds himself perfectly still and expressionless.

The sneer on the Emperor’s face deepens. “By now you must know your father can never be turned from the Dark Side,” he spits. “So it will be with you.”

A sudden calm descends on Luke. _Dukkra ba dukkra_ , he thinks again, and almost smiles. “You’re wrong,” he tells his father’s Depur. “Soon I’ll be dead, and you with me.”

He can feel his father’s surprise, and beneath that his surging terror. He wonders if the Emperor can feel it too. Perhaps that’s why his father’s Master burns with rage even as he laughs.

“Perhaps you refer to the imminent attack of your Rebel fleet,” the Emperor says, and in spite of himself Luke looks up sharply. Thoughts whir through his mind and he tries to tamp them down. The Emperor already knows far more than he should. Luke can’t afford to give him more.

The Emperor’s laughter is more genuinely mocking now. “Yes,” he cackles. “I assure you we are quite safe from your _friends_ here.”

Luke doesn’t know how he might have responded to that, because in that moment he can feel his father’s full attention focused on him, and it steals his breath as surely as if Vader had choked him. There’s a maelstrom of emotion there, raging like a desert storm, unknowable and immense.

Maybe the Emperor really can’t feel it. Luke thinks he would be a lot more worried if he could.

He plants his feet in that storm and breathes, eye to eye with his father’s Depur. “Your overconfidence is your weakness,” he says.

The Emperor scowls. “Your faith in your friends is yours,” he snaps.

The storm that is his father roils around Luke. “It is pointless to resist, my son,” Vader says.

He says it in Basic, and Luke wonders exactly who he is trying to convince.

*

The Emperor knows everything. The imminent arrival of the Rebel fleet, the mission on the sanctuary moon below, every last bit of intel for which so many Bothans died. He knows everything. He’s _planned_ for everything.

_It is pointless to resist_ , Luke hears again, his subconscious twisting his memory until his father’s words resound now in the sneering voice of the Emperor. The Emperor, who is still speaking aloud, though his words are a hateful buzz in Luke’s ears, ever-present and inescapable and droning on until they seem to fill the whole universe.

Luke turns away from the window and its view of the distant space battle. His eyes track desperately around the throne room, landing everywhere but on the Emperor’s twisted face. There’s nothing here but shadows and an edge of cackling laughter, and his father standing silent and still beside the throne, and there, resting on the arm of the throne itself just beside the Emperor’s hand, is Luke’s lightsaber.

He stares at it. Obi-Wan and Yoda said he must kill Vader, and Luke still doesn’t know if he can do that. But this man, this Depur –

That hateful droning voice is still speaking. With effort, Luke tears his gaze from the lightsaber and meets the Master’s golden eyes, and the drone becomes words again.

“ – your Jedi weapon. Use it. I am unarmed. Strike me down with it. Give in to your anger. With each passing moment, you make yourself more my servant.”

Luke breathes in sharply, and it’s almost enough to mask the sound of his father’s breathing. For just a moment, the dark throne room fades away and he’s back in that dusty market in Mos Espa, the sound of the whip and the auctioneer’s booming voice filling the air.

“No!” he gasps, and the Emperor cackles.

His father is still silent.

“It is unavoidable,” the Emperor says with slow relish. “It is your destiny. You, like your father, are now _mine_.”

*

None of the Ekkreth stories Luke heard as a child had ever described Depur’s appearance. They hadn’t needed to. Every Amavikka child knows, without needing to be told, that Depur is a Hutt. Luke has always pictured Jabba.

Now, staring down the Emperor’s baleful eyes, he knows he will never again be able to imagine Depur as anything other than human.

He doesn’t make a conscious decision. His mind is caught on those old stories, on Aunt Beru’s voice soft and insistent in his ears, on the beam of deadly light spat out by this fully operational Death Star, on the lies lies lies and the distant flashes he sees through the web-like window, ships and lives winking out of existence. He is rage and terror and desperation and the lightsaber is in his hand and he swings it –

And his father blocks the blow.

The meeting of their blades sends a shock up Luke’s arm, and it’s that more than the Emperor’s incessant cackling that truly brings him back to the moment.

He knows now, with absolute certainty, that he could kill the Emperor, and he spares a fleeting thought to wish that Obi-Wan and Yoda had asked that of him instead.

But he didn’t come here to fight his father.

He has to remember that.

The Emperor is still speaking, goading him, prodding and mocking like an auctioneer showing off his wares. Luke steps back, breathes, seeks calm in the Force the way Yoda taught him.

The Force is silent, but the desert is not. _Lukka_ , says that deep hollow voice singing through his bones. _Do you know what your name means?_

He shuts off the lightsaber.

His father is standing at the bottom of the steps where Luke drove him in his fury. It’s a little surreal, Luke thinks now. He’s never looked down on the man before.

“Obi-Wan has taught you well,” his father says, and Luke allows himself just a moment of surprise, because Obi-Wan may have been his first teacher, but he never taught Luke to fight. Yoda didn’t, either. Bespin was an education in more ways than one, and Luke knows his fighting style resembles Vader’s more than anything. He knows that his father knows that, too. Luke has no idea why he’d mention Obi-Wan.

A snort of disdain comes from the dark throne behind Luke. He doesn’t turn to look at the Emperor, or acknowledge him in any way. His eyes remain on his father, and he wonders.

“I will not fight you, Father,” he says.

Vader is silent for a long moment as he slowly climbs the steps. The Emperor, for once, is mercifully silent too. Luke watches his father, and he feels the change in his intentions just before the strike comes.

“You are unwise to lower your defenses,” Vader says, lunging at Luke. But Luke is ready for him.

He leaps backward in one smooth motion and lands on the catwalk above the dais, his father’s words still echoing in his mind. Offered with a hint of mockery, yes – for the Emperor’s benefit? Luke wonders. Because there’s no mistaking the meaning of those words, not even in Basic. They’re an offer of advice, and, he realizes now, it’s not the first time. He thinks of Bespin.

Obi-Wan taught him well, Vader has said more than once now. But it’s not Obi-Wan who taught him to fight, not like this, and the realization makes something warm and terrifyingly hopeful spark in his gut.

“Your thoughts betray you, Father,” he says, slipping almost without thought into Amatakka. “I feel the good in you, the conflict.”

His father stands below him, looking up through the lenses of that inscrutable mask. “There is no conflict,” he says.

It’s the first time his father has ever tried to lie to him. He’s shockingly bad at it. Luke almost smiles.

“You couldn’t bring yourself to kill me before,” he says. “And I don’t believe you’ll destroy me now.”

The Force roils around his father, a writhing mass of anger and panic and disgust and hatred and somewhere, beneath all of that, a deep, ageless despair.

“You underestimate the power of the Dark Side,” Vader says, slow and inexorable as the desert. But he says it in Basic, and Luke finds himself wondering at the translation, at what the truth of his father’s words would be in Amatakka. He thinks he can guess. Not _nim_ , but _para_.

“If you will not fight,” says Vader, so deliberately that Luke thinks he must be missing something after all, “then you will meet your destiny.” And he flings his lightsaber in a glowing red arc toward his son.

Luke dodges the blade easily, but it slices through the catwalk he’s standing on and cleaves it neatly in half, and then he’s tumbling in an only partly controlled descent toward the deck. Beneath the crash of metal on metal, he hears the Emperor’s laughter.

He comes to a stop in the shadowed recesses beneath the Emperor’s throne. He can hear the heavy sound of his father’s boots descending the steps, and he shrinks back into the darkness, waiting. He knows he can’t hide, but he needs to regroup, needs to center himself in the Force away from the overwhelming despair of his father’s presence.

But of course Vader isn’t going to allow that.

“You cannot hide forever, Luke,” that deep hollow voice rumbles, closer than he expected, close as an echo of his own thoughts.

“I will not fight you,” Luke breathes into the dark. He can feel his father’s frustration, and for a moment he wonders if –

But then Vader is speaking again. “Give yourself to the Dark Side,” he breathes in a voice that might have been a whisper, if not for the vocoder. “It is the only way to save your friends.”

Luke squeezes his eyes closed, desperate to hide from his own thoughts, but it’s not enough.

“Your feelings for them are strong,” comes that sibilant whisper. “Especially for…”

And then a pause, heavy with the weight of history and bitter despair, and Luke knows – he _knows_ – what’s coming next, but he’s still not prepared.

“Sister…” Luke’s father breathes, and there’s something horribly akin to joy in his voice, the way a blaster is akin to its bolt. “So, you have a twin sister. Your feelings have now betrayed her, too. Obi-Wan was wise to hide her from me. Now his failure is complete.”

He pauses, and Luke braces himself, terror roiling in his gut. He doesn’t know if it’s his or his father’s. He isn’t sure anymore if it even matters.

Not Leia. Not Leia. Wise, ferocious, bereft Leia, strong as any dragon but still so horribly human. He can’t –

“If you will not turn to the Dark Side,” says Vader, “then perhaps she will.”

The scream breaks its way past Luke’s lips, and he launches himself at the monster who would dare to threaten his sister. Only one thought is clear in his mind. _Not Leia._ Leia Depuskalta will never bow to another Master again. Never, never, _never_.

The monster staggers back beneath Luke’s blows, breathing hard and desperate, flailing and then falling, defanged and clawless now, and Luke presses forward with a roar of fury, and then –

“Take your father’s place at my side.”

Luke blinks, a haze lifting from his eyes. He looks down, and there is his father, sprawled out and wheezing with short, ragged breaths. His right hand is a stump of metal and sparking wires. Luke searches the Force, searches his _father_ , and feels only a resigned, hopeless kind of satisfaction. Bile rises in his throat.

His father’s Master is still speaking, but Luke isn’t listening. His own metal hand clenches, once, twice, and he breathes. Old dreams of fire dance behind his eyes.

_Skywalker_ , sings the deep hollow voice of the desert, full of ageless reproach. _Lukka. Do you know what your name means?_

He looks down again, the desert whispering through his bones, and knows himself: again, for the first time.

He is Luke Skywalker. Jedi, pilot, freedom fighter. He is the freeborn son of a slave. He knows what his name means.

He knows what he has to do.

The lightsaber hewn from the bones of the desert clatters in the stillness as he casts it aside, but Luke doesn’t turn to see where it lands. His eyes are fixed on his father’s Master, and he doesn’t flinch.

“Never,” he says, more certain than he’s ever been. “I’ll never turn to the Dark Side. You’ve failed, Your Highness.” Slowly he straightens, his eyes still on the Depur, but his head inclined back toward the man still wheezing on the floor. “I am a Jedi, like my father before me.”

He feels a momentary surge of surprise from his father, and then something that feels like a blinding and existential terror, but there’s no time for him to wonder what that might mean.

“So be it, Jedi,” the Emperor spits. “If you will not be turned, you will be destroyed.”

Blue lightning sparks from his hands and then Luke is burning.

_Oh_ , some detached, observant part of him thinks distantly. _So this is what it feels like._ Someone is screaming. It’s probably him.

The old Depur is still speaking, but Luke is past hearing. Pain and fire rip through him, burning, burning, burning, like his dreams, like the farmstead, like the old songs of freedom and death that only use one word, like the spark igniting a sail barge and Aunt Beru and Uncle Owen’s bodies, still smoldering beside the entrance to the secret surgery, like Tena in the desert, burning and _free_ , like –

“Father, _please_ ,” he hears his own voice cry out.

His father does not answer.

The Depur snarls something in fury, and the fire coursing through Luke’s body increases a hundredfold. His muscles spasm and his bones turn to liquid heat and molten metal, and –

And then it stops.

He’s too exhausted at first to do more than gasp in ragged breaths of fire-scarred air. Someone is screaming, and this time it’s not him. With a great effort, Luke raises his head.

His father is there, wreathed in balefire, the shapes of bone and metal showing through his shadowed form in bright stabs of searing light. He holds the Emperor high, braced against the stump of his arm, and lurches his way to the gaping pit at the center of the throne room.

It’s anything but silent. The Emperor is wailing, pouring forth screaming bolts of blue fire in all directions, and beneath all that Luke hears a terrible rattling in his father’s respirator. The thrum of the monstrous space station grinds on, unceasing.

With a final heave of his flagging strength, Anakin Skywalker hurls his Depur into the abyss. The Emperor falls with a howl and a last blast of dark fire, and Luke’s father nearly follows, collapsing against the railing and sagging forward bonelessly.

Luke, heedless of the ache in his muscles and the shortness of his own breath, pulls himself up and staggers to the edge, pulling his father back and into his arms.

Together, they breathe.

*

Klaxons blare and desperate troopers and their officers rush from place to place like banthas scattering before a pack of anoobas. Not one of them spares a second glance for Luke and his father as they stumble through the echoing halls, and Luke pays them no more attention.

His father is a nearly deadweight draped over his shoulder, his legs dragging a bit behind as Luke struggles toward the hangar Anakin directed him to. The rattling wheeze of air through the damaged respirator is loud in Luke’s ears, and every muscle in his body aches. He can feel each of his bones.

He is alive.

He is alive, and his father is free.

The station shudders beneath their feet, rocked by another blast of Rebel fire. Luke staggers with the movement, rights himself, but not quite fast enough. His father slips from his arms and then falls, with all the slow, inexorable gravity of a star moving through space.

He doesn’t get up again. Can’t, Luke thinks. His prosthetic legs seem locked in place, and all too many of his systems are shutting down.

Luke knows that. He knows what it means. He’s trying not to think about it, though. Not now, when he’s finally found his father, when Anakin is finally _free_.

_Dukkra ba dukkra_. The words drift through his mind again, a mocking edge of hysteria to them now. He’d thought them before, yes, but they were meant for _him_. Not for his father.

He bends to grab his father’s arms, to raise him up again, to –

“Lukka,” gasps Anakin. His voice is still deep and hollow like the desert, but quiet now, so quiet Luke has to lean close to hear him. He doesn’t know what all the lights on his father’s chestplate mean, but he’s sure the way they’re blinking and fluctuating can’t be good.

“Lukka,” says Anakin again. “Help me take this mask off.”

Luke goes still. “But you’ll die,” he breathes.

“Nothing can stop that now,” Anakin says, but there’s no hint of regret in his voice, only a kind of wistfulness that Luke is almost afraid to understand. “Just for once, let me look on you with my own eyes.”

The desert sings through his blood, sweeping all the fear away. There’s only this: his father, and himself, and no more chains to bind either of them. 

Slowly, reverently, Luke lifts the mask away.

The man beneath is scarred and marked by fire, his age impossible to guess, his eyes misty and unfocused. And blue. He has Luke’s eyes.

Those eyes are soft with wonder, gazing up at Luke as though he’s witnessing a miracle, and for just a moment, everything else fades away.

Then Anakin smiles. “Now go, my son,” he chokes out, his voice barely a whisper of sand on the wind. “Leave me.”

Luke reels back. “No! You’re coming with me,” he insists. “I’ll not leave you here. I’ve got to save you!”

Anakin’s smile quirks, turns to something amazed and fond and just a little amused. “You already have, Lukka,” he whispers. “You were right. You were right about me.” Pride and regret and quiet joy chase their way across his face as he breathes on one last, exhausted exhale, “Tell your sister you were right.”

And then his eyes fall closed and he slips to the floor. Anakin Skywalker – pilot, Jedi, repairer of chains, Depuskalta – is dead. Luke’s father is dead.

He bows his head and allows himself a silent moment to weep.

*

Luke knows his friends are expecting him. He can feel Leia’s elation at their victory, her relief that he’s safe. He desperately wants to see her.

But there’s something else he has to do first.

He builds the pyre in a clearing of the forest, far enough distant from the Ewok village that he can be sure no one will stumble on him here. The wood is wet with recent rain, and in the end he’s forced to use his lightsaber to strike a flame.

That feels right, somehow. Desert fire following the rain. And tonight of all nights.

He’d realized it only as he was blasting his way out of the exploding Death Star, piloting a shuttle that had once transported the Emperor himself, his father’s body laid out in the state room. He’d become so used to operating on the galactic standard calendar that he’d nearly forgotten.

But the fire reminded him.

Far away on Tatooine, the three moons are shining full in the sky, and bonfires will be blazing up throughout the Quarters. They might not even hide them this year, Luke thinks. Jabba the Great Depur is dead.

And now the Emperor is dead, too. Dead on Bentu Depuraak, and Luke’s father is free.

He watches the flames blaze up into the night, dancing and bright, watches them catch on the armored prison his father wore for so many years, watches dark plastic slowly lose its shape and melt away, watches the sparks rise into the sky like birds flying away.

The wind cries with a desert voice through the green green forest, deep and hollow and tender as the memory of Aunt Beru’s oldest lullaby. _Te masu em lukkema_ , his father breathes on the wind. Luke’s eyes are wet with rain, and the fire before him crackles like the storm. He lifts his face to the sky and smiles.

*

He goes back to his friends at last. They’re celebrating, laughing and dancing in unbridled joy, and Luke can’t help but join in. It’s Bentu Depuraak, even if he’s the only one who knows that, and really, this party wouldn’t look out of place on Tatooine. He catches a glimpse of Wedge, dancing with more enthusiasm than skill, and two Rebels he doesn’t know eagerly taking a turn on the stormtrooper helmets the Ewoks are using as drums. And then there’s Leia and Han, standing casual and close, and Luke knows that something has changed there, become more settled, and it softens the smile on his face.

He feels a tug in the Force. It’s gentle, not prodding, and it feels like…home. Luke slips away and follows it.

He looks out into the forest night, and there they are. Obi-Wan, and Yoda, and…his father.

Luke doesn’t have to wonder who he is. He’d recognize that smile anywhere.

They don’t say anything, not aloud, but Luke feels it in the Force: the deep sense of peace in Yoda, the mingled pride and relief in Obi-Wan, and from his father something bright, incandescent as a bonfire beneath three full moons. Love.

_Te masu em lukkema._ The words drift again through the air, smelling of rain.

Leia’s hand comes to rest on his shoulder and she smiles at him, pulling him back toward the party and their friends. He grins at her in turn and follows.

*

Leia finds him again early the next morning. She steps out onto the balcony beside him and doesn’t say a word.

Luke doesn’t turn to look at her, not yet. His eyes are still trained on the world before them, the trunks of the immense trees disappearing down into mist, the golden light of morning filtering soft through their leaves and filling everything with a quiet, fragile splendor.

He doesn’t realize he’s humming under his breath until Leia says, her voice hushed but almost teasing, “What’s that you’re singing?”

Luke stills. A moment later he smiles. “It’s something my aunt used to sing,” he says.

Beside him Leia tilts her head and just gazes steadily at him for a long silent moment. Then she nods once. Her smile is a soft secret.

“Will you teach me?” she asks.

_Pass on what you have learned_ , the memory of Yoda whispers through his mind. And then, _Tell your sister…_

Luke turns from the gilded forest and finds Leia there, the sunlight shining soft on her strong hands.

“Yes,” he breathes, and begins to sing.

_Tena light the fires, the night is drawing in._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Amatakka translations:
> 
> _depukrekta_ : literally, "a repairer of chains," that is, a former slave who aids the Masters or even becomes a Master themself  
>  _keekta-du_ : one who has forgotten where they come from, forgotten their people and their culture  
>  _para_ : power, that which controls, that which must be obeyed  
>  _nim_ : power, agency, freedom to choose  
>  _Ek toparaka em Depura_ : I must obey my Master  
>  _dukkra ba dukkra_ : freedom or death, freedom one way or the other  
>  _depuskalta_ : Master-slayer  
>  _Bentu Depuraak_ : literally, "the reckoning of the Masters," this is the midmost and holiest night of the Marokkepu festival  
>  _Te masu em lukkema_ : you are my freedom


End file.
